Monday, May 2, 2011

As a Social Media person you would be putting in long hours of research, time, energy and deep understanding on what you may post / write on Blogs and other Social Media Sites. Your work could be by way of content curation or by way of out of the box thinking. Whatever format and route you may apply, it would be original and authentic when you pen it down. While you go about doing your work on a daily basis there are people who would like to copy paste what you do and simply put it up on their Blog / Website. What happens here is that sooner or later traffic would start to go there as well. Am sure you will have heard of such cases.

What exactly is copying:
The online content theft is popularly known as plagiarism. In simple terms plagiarism is copying either directly or coming close to another author's language, thoughts, ideas or expression - and representing them as one's own. In other words an obvious theft.

In order to protect your work there are a couple of things that you could do:

License: You can upfront put up a mention that the material cannot be used in any way by anyone. You can link your site with Creativecommons which will give you a banner that mentions that the material is protected. From this site you get a license that secures your work. Creativecommons is not a law firm so they will not enforce any law. However when you have their license of ownership protection, you can question the other party.

Monitor: You can have your matter regularly checked. There are a couple of sites which enable you to check if your work is taken / picked and produced as some other person's work. The most popular one is Copyscape. The others are Plagium, Copygator and so on. You will receive an automated notification when your matter is reproduced elsewhere.

The tools that can help you to monitor and keep a check are:

Google Alerts

Plagium

Copygator

Feed Burner

Digital FigerPrint

Tineye

If you do want to be open to sharing:
There are sites like Fairshare which enable you to post your material and get paid for this if someone picks it up. Their modus operandi is: The more people that use your articles, the more views these used articles get the more you get paid.